1000 Words A Day

I recently joined a writer’s group on Facebook and through the posts, my ideas on self-publishing have been changing. This group is about quantity, along with quality, and the production numbers I’ve seen seemed hard for me to reach.

The more you write and publish, the more you’ll sell. And of course, the quality has to be there or else no one would buy anything.

It sounds simple enough right?

But the problem becomes the quantity. How can you write that much to have over a dozen books of 50,000+ words out a year (and some in that group are in the range of two dozen books if not more)?

I’ve been wrestling with that idea. I know I’m not that fast. I can be when there’s a deadline and I find the groove. But otherwise I’m really not that fast. I have plans for the year and that involves a steady writing workload. I think it’s possible but I was still having a hard time grasping how many words that would end up being.

Then someone in the group posted a breakdown that helps:

1000 words a day X 365 days in a year = 365,000 words

Breaking it down at an average of 50,000 words a book and you’re looking at 7.3 books a year.

That doesn’t seem so hard now does it?

There are other things that would possibly impact that 1000 words a day. Editing, rewrites, writer’s block and life.

Say you only write for an hour a day? 1000 words a day would be 16 words a minute. That doesn’t seem that hard.

Sometimes the bigger numbers seem impossible, hard to reach, but if you break it down to smaller parts then suddenly it starts becoming easier to work with.